A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase: Instapaper

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/instapaper-a-5-app-that-justifies-your-iphone-purchase/

by xtimesninety • 17 years ago

70 71 17 years ago

Interestingly, the guy who wrote O'Reilly's book "Best iPhone Apps" also picked Instapaper as the absolute best iPhone app (http://endlessyears.com/?p=1373), after reviewing (or, at least, considering) 65,000 apps, and selecting his top 200.

brandnewlow2• 17 years ago

Why am I not surprised that the iPhone's "killer app" is something that lets you circumvent the copyrights and advertising on content sites?

Is there a way to block this app or have it generate just a link instead of a full-text version of the article that lacks all the advertising?

pistoriusp2• 17 years ago

Mr. Murdoch, is that you?

Zev5• 17 years ago

If thats what you think Instapaper is, you've completely missed the point of it. Instapaper saves articles so you can read them later, offline. You know, without having to wait for a large site to load over 3G (or worse, EDGE. Or the lack of wifi, if you have an iPod touch).

4chan4ever• 17 years ago

It strips content down to plain text, removing any advertising, promotional links, social networking buttons, etc., and it does so without the permission of the originating site. Digg tried to pull something similar when they introduced the Digg toolbar (embedding original content in a frame) and people got hopping mad. But I guess on the iPhone anything goes, since Apple owns the copyright for rounded rectangles.

pistoriusp2• 17 years ago

I usually find that things I bookmark for later consumption, are rarely read. Unless they apply to something technical that I implement and read up on later.

almost• 17 years ago

Exactly, if I don't have time to read it now then how come I'm browsing around finding links. And if I do have time to read it now but am choosing not then I will probably continue to choose not to.

masklinn2• 17 years ago

The only way for me to read backlogs is to just keep them open in tabs, at some point I get frustrated by having 50+ tabs open and just triage, read & discard.

jonshea• 17 years ago

I do the same thing, but I use Safari which can only restore tabs from the single most previous session. At some point my browser will crash, and then will crash again before I’ve restored the previous session. And then my reading black log will be cleared. I can’t decide if this is a bug or a feature.

I use instapaper for articles I really want to read. The tilt to scroll is amazing. It might be my favorite way to read.

omnipath• 17 years ago

That is why I like Opera. You can actually save sessions, and return to them. So you can have more than one session going on at a time. I usually save a session once a month. It's quite interesting seeing what I was into 5-6 years ago.

smikhanov• 17 years ago

Not with Instapaper/iPhone combination. When you saving links to read later when you'll be at your computer, you'll probably never come back to them (in most cases "getting to your computer" means "starting working", not "starting reading yesterday's links").

Instapaper gives you your saved links when you have nothing else to do (e.g. commuting), and this makes a huge difference.

AndrewDucker2• 17 years ago

Read It Later does much the same thing. I use it all the time to bookmark things for later use. It's an addon for Firefox, but works with any browser through bookmarklets.

http://readitlaterlist.com/iphone/

pclark• 17 years ago

whats the advantage of this over instapaper? FYI: Instapaper came first

AndrewDucker2• 17 years ago

I didn't know that, so thanks!

But I find the way that ReadItLater works inside Firefox to work well - the fact that it's an icon on the toolbar, showing me how many unread things I have is kinda nice.

terpaul• 17 years ago

FYI: That's absolutely not true. Read It Later came out 5 months before Instapaper and had offline reading nearly a year before IP.

crsmith• 17 years ago

http://www.givemesomethingtoread.com

Instapaper's popular items

mildweed2• 17 years ago

As if I have a shortage of things to read. My RSS feeds are neglected, and all are worthy of reading. Get me an app that buys me the time to catch up on my reading-- now that'd be a killer app.

jdunck• 17 years ago

Try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio... http://www.zapreader.com/

danw3• 17 years ago

I've found instapaper during my morning commute is an app that buys me time to catch up on reading. Works even better if you commute by tube and there is no phone signal to distract you (with email, twitter, etc).

zandorg• 17 years ago

I wrote a HTML stripper for my Amiga in 1998! Hardly innovative.

jlees• 17 years ago

I feel I must be alone in this after all the Instapaper hype, but I just can't read stuff enjoyably on my iPhone.

raptorex• 17 years ago

yeah, it's convenient but I get eye strain pretty easily. if you happen to have a kindle, hatchet does the same thing for it. it's a much better platform for reading text. it costs $0.15 per use via Amazon's conversion charge though.

http://hatchetapp.com/

Multiplayer• 17 years ago

I've gone the other direction. I have the latest Kindle but I don't bother using it - I read all my Kindle purchases on the Iphone. It's always with me and I love the screen. I would sell it but I think I have to have one active to purchase items for my account.

Zak• 17 years ago

I've been using a similar (open source) program for my old Palm M500 for years. It's called Plucker.

unalone6• 17 years ago

The other killer iPhone app is Tweetie, a $3 Twitter client that, if you’re a Twitter user and have multiple accounts, is as indispensable as a needle to a heroin addict.

Oh, Wired. Continuing to destroy your credibility by insisting that a single client among dozens is a killer application if you use a certain website in a certain rare use case.

ubernostrum2• 17 years ago

Yeah, using Twitter is such an incredibly weird rare fringe thing these days. Next you'll tell me that this "web" thing isn't just a fad...

unalone6• 17 years ago

You and your fucking snark. Hacker News is a place with lots of smart people saying smart things. Snark is for when people say something that is obviously stupid and not worth a debate. If you want to disagree with me, do it earnestly, because perhaps this is worth a discussion.

Twitter is the #13 site globally according to Alexa. Does that mean that a Blogger app would be more of a killer app than a Twitter app? What about a MySpace app? MSN? Windows Live? Google? If I told you that the iPhone's killer app was a Google search, wouldn't that sound stupid?

But Wired isn't just saying that. They're saying that Tweetie, one of a hundred Twitter applications, is a killer app and that the other applications aren't. Furthermore, Tweetie is a killer app if you use Twitter with multiple accounts. That is an incredible weird rare fringe thing. I'd bet most Twitter users have a single account.

Now do you want to attempt sarcasm again? Because I'll warn you: Not only do I know more about what I'm arguing than you do, I'm a better snarker than you, and I will tear you to little fucking pieces.

I remember when I joined HN and routinely felt dwarfed by the intellectual discourse here. Now I say something and the response is likely as not bullshit like yours. I feel so goddamn old.

antidaily• 17 years ago

Tweetie is by far the best twitter client I've used. And 100% worthy of such high and arbitrary accolades.

unalone6• 17 years ago

Its design is brilliant—I am similarly a fan, though I don't Twitter—but my point was that "killer app" means something that "the best twitter client I've ever used" does not.

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

Tweetdeck syncs with our desktop experience. For people that need to filter the stream to grok it better (read: eventually everyone), Tweetdeck is better.

castis• 17 years ago

everything i'd like to read is normally already stored here on HN.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

One side note: Instapaper pro is rated “17 and up” for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes,” which is an indication of Apple’s bizarre and arbitrary approval and rating policies.

Not a big deal I suppose, but this is perverse to the point of obnoxiousness. This is slanderous, when you think about it.

lukifer• 17 years ago

There are many apps stuck with a 17+ rating due to the app being able to access content from the web which may or may not be kid-safe. It's a policy which is paranoid and inconsistently applied, but it's not entirely arbitrary.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

I get that...what irritates me is they don't do the same with Safari. With this logic, one could complain that the alphabet isn't kid safe because you can make naughty words out of it, or that a clock app promotes pot use because it reads 4:20 twice a day. A 17+ rating applied on such general grounds really creates a false impression about the products it's applied to, suggesting they are somehow more likely to expose the user to objectionable content and thus hurting sales.

xtimesninety• 17 years ago

the only problem i have reading on the ipod touch is my arm kinda gets tired quickly because of the weight (and its awkward to hold it with 2 hands when reading). if only the zune hd had a similar app to instapaper i'm sure it's the next thing i would buy.

crxnamja• 17 years ago

I just started using this service and completely love it.

dabeeeenster• 17 years ago

This is the one app that would stop me from ditching the iPhone and going to Android. Anyone know of a comparable app/service for Android?

A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase: Instapaper

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